Setting up Out-of-hours Chatbot

What is the Out-of-hours Chatbot?

The Out-of-hours Chatbot is intended to give a response to customers using your webchat outisde of your normal office hours. It informs the customer of your normal opening hours, then offers to send the customer's contact information to your team so the customer can get a response during office hours. If the customer chooses this option, the chatbot will collect the customer's contact details and subject for the enquiry. The Chatbot will then send that information to an email address of your choice.  The Out-of-hours Chatbot is part of the standard package for all Omni clients and can be set up for no additional cost.

Contact LeadDesk

If you want to take advantage of the Out-of-hours Chatbot, you will need to contact your account manager. They will need the following information:

• Your company name.
• Your client ID.
• A name you want to give the Chatbot.
• The language for the Chatbot.
• The email address the contact information should be sent to.
• Your normal opening hours, in whatever format you want the chatbot to use. Consider whether you need to include timezone information. In the example above, the opening times were specified as Mon-Fri 9-16.

With this information your account manager can activate the Chatbot for your environment.  

Flow

First, create a Flow. For more information about creating flows see this article. In your Admin application:

1. Go to the Inbound page.
2. Go to the Flows sub-page.

You will be shown a list of any previously created flows.

3. To create a new flow, click the New Flow button.
4. Type a Flow Name. As always, it is a good idea to choose a meaningful name.
5. Click OK.

The New Flow button assumes that you wish to create a flow for handling incoming calls. To create a flow for handling incoming messages instead:

6. Click the Flows sub-page to return to the list of existing flows.
7. Find the flow you just created in the list.
8. Click Create Message Flow.

There may be reasons you need your flow to do things beyond deciding if the chat should go to the queue or the chatbot, but this simple example flow will direct customers either to the queue to chat with agents, or to the chatbot, depending on the time of day:

9. Drag the Timing applet to start the flow.
10. Make sure the Timezone is selected correctly.
11. Click the + for each day of the week you are open, type the opening hours for that day of the week.

12. In the Open applet section, drag to add the Queue applet. 
13. In the Closed applet section, drag to add the Chatbot applet.
14. For the Queue applet, click the drop-down lists to select the correct queue and campaign for messages to go to agents.
15. For the Chatbot applet, click the Select a chatbot drop-down list to select the correct chatbot (if necessary). The out-of-hours chatbot will have whatever name you asked for earlier. 
16. Click the Save button in the top left.

Now you need to connect the inbound messages to this flow.

Inbound Route

For more information about creating inbound routes for webchat, see this article. In summary, in your Admin account:

1. Go to the Inbound page.
2. Go to the Inbound routes subpage.
3. Click the Create button.

Click the Type drop-down list and select Webchat. For the Webchat domain, paste the address of the webpage where your webchat is hosted. Don't include http:// or https:// just include the page address. The Connector id will be automatically created. You will need this in the setup of your webchat widget. Click the Destination type drop-down list and select Flow. Click the Flow drop-down list and select the name of the flow you created in the previous section. Click the OK button.

Webchat widget

For instructions on installing and configuring the webchat widget, see this article. You will need to know:

• The Connector id from the Inbound route you created.
• The region for your LeadDesk environment.

In your Admin account, check the URL.  The three characters before .leaddesk.com will tell you your region. In this example, the region is QED.